It is finer because, without the poetical brilliance of these, the lightning flash, it is staider, more in tone with the subject, more said for ever, more excellent. Yes, but it is a prose excellence. That a prose excellence was wanted here should not disguise this from us. The 'Ode on Eton College' is a perfect prose triumph -popular just for that, since the public has difficulty in understanding poetry,-a prose triumph with its careful enumeration of the woes of age, with its perfect enumeration of the unnoticed delights of youth :

'The thoughtless day, the easy night.'

How does it happen with Gray where he essays a flight more distinctively poetical? He has written many Odes. They have been greatly admired, and many have facilely tried to imitate their laboured excellence. < The imitators have failed. They did not realise that, however lacking these Odes might be in a strictly poetical excellence, they are the production of a man who had observed life carefully and who never wrote a line that was not pregnant with the meaning of a real experience. For ourselves, if we were to speak openly and not as children of yesterday, we would confess at once that these Odes, with all their admirable merits, leave us cold. We can admire the justice of the sentiments, without feeling that inner warmth of feeling that communicates its warmth. Some old things may be said in such a way that we seem to feel them for the first time :

'No motion has she now, no force ;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.'

A woman in an old Scots ballad addresses the ghost of her murdered lover whose wraith she is painfully following:

'Sae painfully she clam the wa',
She clam the wa' up after him;

Hosen nor shoon upon her feet,

She hadna time to put them on.

"Is there ony room at your head, Saunders?

Is there ony room at your feet?

Or ony room at your side, Saunders,

Where fain, fain, I wad sleep?""

These old things may be said in some such way, and new things may be said without making new men of us. I do not know that Gray says many new things in his Odes, but the old things do not move.

It is impossible to imagine sentiments more just than those with which the 'Ode to Adversity' is crowded. But it is precisely this, their exact justice, that keeps the Ode within the domain of prose. What should I ask from Adversity?—

'Teach me to love, and to forgive,

Exact my own defects to scan.'

One should do so, but it is too near a perfect propriety. There is here neither the cry of the 'liméd soul' that struggles to be free, nor the ecstasy of virtue :

'To humbler functions, awful Power.'

To Wordsworth duty is awful, awful because he is a poet and feels the frailty of man.

We may pass a similar criticism upon the more ambitious efforts, 'The Progress of Poesy' and 'The Bard'; nor must the studiedly poetical language

conceal from us that those pieces also are the work of one who was pre-eminently a critic, the justest and most discriminating of critics, but at bottom a critic still. Take a passage that looks like poetry :—

'O'er Idalia's velvet green

The rosy-crowned Loves are seen

On Cytherea's day

With antic Sport, and blue-eyed Pleasures,
Frisking light in frolic measures;

Now pursuing, now retreating,
Now in circling troops they meet:
To brisk notes in cadence beating,
Glance their many-twinkling feet.'

No criticism of the dance, no sympathetic exposition of the charm of quick and intertwining motion could be better. What a genius is necessary so to represent! The dance with its changing measure is seen; the accompanying music with its change of time is actually heard. But the poetry of motion! We have only to remember :-

'When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so,
And own no other function.'

> It is interpretation as opposed to presentment, a thing felt as against a thing seen, the rhythmic motion getting itself expressed in the undesigned arrangement of four words :

'Move still, still so.'

Shakespeare does not always write poetry; but whereever he is pre-eminently good, he makes his effect by a reliance on the poetical method. He is thus preeminently a poet. Gray does not always write prose;

but wherever he is pre-eminently good we find, with few exceptions, that his method is the method of prose. His genius is thus pre-eminently a prose genius.

But how admirable are the efforts of this genius; how penetrating is the criticism, how 'exact to scan '! Shakespeare was what? 'Nature's Darling,' 'im

mortal Boy,' an únstudied genius full to the last of the juicy sallies of youth; and Milton that 'rode sublime,' the exact adjective, 'upon the seraph wings of Ecstacy'; and Dryden, and Pindar

'The Bard' and the 'Ode for Music' are poems not to be admired so greatly. They are too like poetry; without being poetry, too like it. The effort, the laboured effort, to simulate the fine frenzy is disconcerting. We miss our familiar Gray.

He is there, of course, just as good a critic as ever, and never a vulgar critic. When the gross vulgar, for example, think of Henry the Eighth, they think of a fat man with six beheaded wives. Yet some memory of Mr. Froude may intervene, and of what Carlyle said to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who, demurring to Carlyle's statement that Henry knew what he wanted, 'suggested that, among the things he wanted and knew how to get, was as long a roll of wives as the Grand Turk. It would have been a more humane method to have taken them, like that potentate, simultaneously than successively; he would have been saved the need of killing one to make room for another, and then requiring Parliament to disgrace itself by sanctioning the transaction.

'Carlyle replied that this method of looking at King

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Henry's life did not help much to the understanding of it. He was a true ruler at a time when the will of the Lord's anointed counted for something, and it was likely that he did not regard himself as doing wrong in any of these things over which modern sentimentality grew so impatient.' And so Gray :— 'the majestic lord,

That broke the bonds of Rome.'

And again of the Tower, which we are apt to think of with a curious national pride :

'Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame,

With many a foul and midnight murder fed.'

But in the main, 'The Bard' is a poem in which the critical side of Gray is not prominently seen. He establishes a reputation as an historical scene-painter, and the whole procession of English history from the Edwards passes in learned, if laboured, review :—

'The shrieks of death, through Berkley's roof that ring.'
'Low on his funeral couch he lies!'

'Her lion-port,

Her awe-commanding face.' ·

But somehow I cannot think that the old prophet about to plunge in the roaring tide would have been so particular. 'The Bard' is an attempt to give to an historical account the hurry and rapture of poetry; and this attempt succeeds. 'The Bard' is a hurried, rapturous, and precise performance. It has some of the characteristics of poetry without being poetry. It has the particularity of prose without the leisure to be prose. It is executed as a poet would execute it, but it is not conceived as a poet would conceive it. It is an attempt to make poetry by adding the adjuncts of a poem to a distinctively eighteenth-century task.